Vernon official touts drug overdose antidote

Vernon Councilman Dan Kadish appeared to catch his colleagues off guard when he proposed police funding for an anti-opiate drug reversing heroin overdoses.

“It certainly doesn’t solve the drug issue, but it saves lives,” Kadish said Thursday of naloxene.

The antidote helps restore breathing after a heroin overdose and goes by the brand name Narcan. It has been part of the federal Office of National Drug Control Policy’s action plan since 2012.

Kadish said he learned about Narcan when New York’s attorney general, last month, proposed a statewide pilot program after a surge in overdose fatalities.

Kadish’s proposal, made just prior to the council adopting the municipal budget April 14, went nowhere. Yet, at least in terms of Sussex County, Kadish was ahead of the curve in voicing support for stocking the police department with naloxone.

A pilot program in Ocean County, in which officers from all 32 police departments began carrying Narcan in early April, is drawing national attention.

Al Della Fave, a spokesman for the Ocean County Prosecutor’s Office, told the New Jersey Herald on Thursday that Narcan restored breathing for six people who had overdosed on heroin last month.

Della Fave, in characterizing such outcomes as “reversals,” said the likelihood is that death would have resulted without the drug.

“We were calling it ‘saves’ initially. You’re better off couching it as a reversal. They might have pulled through (without Narcan). You don’t know,” said Della Fave, the former communications director for the state police.

A key element in the Ocean County program is the “Overdose Protection Act,” signed in May 2013 by Gov. Chris Christie.

The law indemnified from liability those administering overdose antidotes in life-threatening situations.

Christie’s office, at that time, cited a Centers for Disease Control finding that between 2002 and 2004, a total of 50 naxolene programs nationwide had reversed more 10,000 overdoses of opioid drugs such as heroin, morphine and oxycontin.

Vernon, in particular, would seem like a receptive venue for a Narcan police program.

At Monday’s meeting, Annmarie Shafer, coordinator of the Vernon Coalition, said that five members of the high school’s Class of 2008 died of heroin overdoses in 2010.

However, the initiative, by all accounts, needs to start with the prosecutor’s office, as it did in Ocean County.

It is unclear whether Sussex County Prosecutor David Weaver, whose term expires in August, is pursuing the program.

EMS physician Ken Lavelle, who helped develop the Ocean County program, said it is expanding to Monmouth, Camden and Middlesex counties but not necessarily everywhere.

“You have some county prosecutors who say they’re not interested,” Lavelle said. “They have to look at, do they have a problem in their jurisdiction?”

Sussex County heroin use is not as widespread as in Ocean County, where fatal heroin overdoses soared from 53 in 2012 to 112 last year.

In 2013, Sussex County had 13 fatal overdoses, though the number due to heroin was not immediately available.

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